


Pyrrhus

by shorelines



Category: RWBY
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-20
Updated: 2016-02-20
Packaged: 2018-05-21 23:47:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6062677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shorelines/pseuds/shorelines
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When you were young, you learned what “pyrrhic victory” meant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pyrrhus

When you were young, you learned what “pyrrhic victory” meant. 

“It means victory won at a great cost,” your mother tells you. You remember how she smelled like pumpkin pie and rainwater, how she kept her hair cropped short and let you grow yours long, just because your favourite huntress that year wore it that way. She is so much taller than you, a giantess, and from her hands flow vegetables and hot soup and books of fairy tales. “It is a victory so devastating it is almost a defeat.”

Your face scrunches up at that. “Why does it look like my name?”

“Your name is Pyrrha,” your mother says, and she kneels down next to where you sit, surrounded by open books. “And you were named after your beautiful red hair.” She points to the words in the book you have open and then to the picture on the next page, one of a mighty huntress with hair like yours, long and free and red. “My darling, you are your own victory.”

She does not tell you how you were born. She does not tell you that you were not born into the world screaming, she does not tell you that red for hair could also mean red for blood. She does not tell you how she almost died that night, and would have done so gladly, for you to be born.

Instead, you are told you are a heroine, worthy of your own legends despite your lack of victories. They will come, your mother said. You almost catch her hand before she is ushered back onto the airship. It’s your first day at school, you see. You’ll see her again at the end of the year, but now it is time to learn how to fight.

And the victories come, again and again. You cannot lose, because you were born for this. You call it destiny. They call you a prodigy, and place you on a pedestal, so far from everyone else. They keep themselves out of your magnetic reach by putting you in front of their monsters. You look at all of this and see that this is your future, and you march forward. You march and you see so many of your classmates, your fellow aspiring hunters, fall behind.

You march until you meet a boy like a fluttering light, and he makes your heart hurt like an open wound. He’s all awkward angles and stuttering words, but there is something in the way that he holds his shield that catches your eye—how he makes the sun dance off of it, how it is the emblem of an old family in new hands. You think it is in the way he holds his sword not like a weapon, but a lantern, wavering yet bright.

You walk until you meet a girl with a red cape and a weight on her shoulders and she reminds you of when you were young. So bright and promising, a lone prodigy with a destiny ahead of her. She reminds you of you until her sister hugs her and her new team gathers around her. You look away.

Remember, you have not left your post at the frontline, where the monsters lurk in wait. Remember, you are not allowed to just be a girl at school, laughing with her friends and missing her mother. You are made to remember this when your destiny is handed to you in a glass coffin, and in this underground murky hall, you are asked to choose.

For the first time, you run.

You run until you pass by a woman in the courtyard that night. You barely catch the shine of her dark hair and you noticed the eyes, gleaming like amber. But you keep running, because you can feel something like a rope tugging you forward, and while your heart aches, you know that this is your duty.

And just as autumn begins to fade to winter, you forget that red for hair could also mean red for fire. Too late, too late. Your think about what your mother said, about pyrrhic victory. The years have passed, and you are old enough now to know the truth. You still have your destiny.

Incredibly, as you fight her, your mind goes back to those fairy tales you read on the warm kitchen floor of your childhood home. In your favourite stories, the heroine always had red hair. She always had a destiny, and she always loved a beautiful boy. And (this is the part you read over and over) she was always killed, in the end.

Didn’t you dream of dying young, just a year ago?

You are slaughtered at the top of the tower, and you wonder where the victory is in this. What happens when someone dies like a martyr, and no one is around hear?

As you die, you see a flicker of a red cape, and silver light. Of course. You should have known that your destiny had always lay with her.

They mourn everything they lost, and you.

* * *

In the future, the one you killed will tell the others how you wept, when you heard them call you a saint.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> rip in peace my dude


End file.
